


Imagine

by honestys_easy



Category: American Idol RPF
Genre: American Idol - RPS, Cell Phones, Central Park, Fluff, M/M, Manhattan, New York City, Speakerphone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-05-11
Updated: 2007-05-11
Packaged: 2017-12-05 07:25:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/720396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honestys_easy/pseuds/honestys_easy





	Imagine

“Oh, man, look!”

Phil pointed wildly at a clearing in the distance of the park, his eyes wider than they usually were. He was like a kid in a candy store, his eyes darting everywhere, trying to absorb as much of New York City as humanly possible in two days. With an arm around his wife’s shoulders, he nearly galloped over to the monochrome mosaic, his face breaking out into a grin.

Sighing, Chris followed behind them slowly, keeping pace with the bodyguards and officials from the show. It was a nice reprieve that the producers were allowing them, a little time to see the city. It broke the monotony of airports and television green rooms that had become the backdrop to Chris’s life for the past five days. And while he was certainly enjoying this respite, in a bustling and beautiful city he had never experienced before, he wasn’t counting it as a second honeymoon opportunity as the Staceys were. In fact, it wasn’t even his first honeymoon, or the equivalent of a romantic weekend getaway. Because he really wanted to share it with…

“Come on…come on! Take a picture!” Phil was nearly hopping with excitement in the clearing, oblivious to the passersby snapping photos of the recent celebrities.

Despite his pensive mood, Chris couldn’t help but chuckle. “Didn’t know you were such a Lennon fan,” he said to Phil as he warmed up the digital camera. He spied the stark, simple beauty of the Imagine memorial through the viewfinder and his breath hitched in his throat.

Phil waved a dismissive hand at Chris. “You can’t be a musician and not like Lennon.” He took in the flowers and the letters scattered around the circular pattern; he knew he wasn’t alone in those feelings. “It’s like being a writer and not liking Shakespeare. Being an artist and not revering Michelangelo.” He stood close to his wife, holding their youngest daughter, the elder snoozing in a stroller before them. “Well?” he asked, in perfect posing position. “You gonna take the picture or not?”

Chris snapped out of his contemplative trance and raised the camera to his face. The image it presented to him tugged at his heartstrings: a man and his wife, children, all with smiling, unassuming faces, without a care about how the media perceives them, or if they’re standing too close together. Phil can put his arm around her and onlookers will call it beautiful. They were a fucking Christmas card, a model family. Chris glanced down at the message in the mosaic: Imagine. Chris imagined a world that was easier; where he could smile just as Phil did, and truly mean it.

> _“Sure, you’ve listened to the words before,” Blake had once said to him, the night he chose to make a statement with a John Lennon song. “But have you ever really listened to what he’s trying to tell us?”_

He tried to shake the memory out of his head. No need to dwell on it; not now. “Say Cheese,” he said plainly, and pressed on the shutter.

The Staceys and the memory of John Lennon filled the viewfinder screen, immortalized; happy.

Chris couldn’t take it.

Handing the camera over to one of the assistants, he dropped down onto a park bench, emotions flooding over him. Pressing his fingers to his temples, he chanted over in his head. _You’ll still see him. He’ll still be there. It’s not over yet._

“Hey.” He snapped his head up to see Phil standing before him, a look of concern on his face. “You okay?”

All the possible excuses ran through Chris’s head, some believable, some that were downright ludicrous but Phil would probably believe anyway. The interviews and the jet-setting were draining; the bitterness over elimination was finally catching up with him. He was so moved by Strawberry Fields that he felt physically weak. He could blame it on allergies.

But there was nothing to gain from hiding it anymore.

“He would have liked this,” he said simply. Phil locked eyes with him, and there was no need to mention whom he spoke of.

Phil placed a hand to his head; had he any hair, he’d be nervously fiddling with it by now. The emotion in the younger man’s eyes was sudden, yet genuine. He looked like he was dying inside, something raw and terrible gnawing away at him. Phil looked over his shoulder at his wife, bathed in the spotty sunshine beneath the birch trees, smiling as she cradled their daughter. He knew what Chris was feeling, knew it well. Felt it every time he was asked to be away from his family. Silent sorrow was hollowing out his friend, and he wasn’t going to let that happen.

“You know,” Phil said in a hushed voice so the suits Idol insisted to tag along wouldn’t hear. “It’s only about…nine-thirty, ten o’clock in L.A. right now.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and gave Chris a knowing look. “They’d still be having breakfast, probably. You wouldn’t be interrupting a thing.”

Chris started to give the older man a skeptical look, was about to spout off threads of macho ideology on coming between a man and his breakfast sausage, when he looked at Phil’s face, and he realized it. Phil knew. And there wasn’t any point in denying, or laughing it off, and the thought of hearing his voice again, even over a cell phone…

Without noticing he was doing it, Chris had his phone out in his hand, outstretched, flipped open. A picture of the final six close contestants grinned back at him from the screen, and his eyes instantly went to the familiar dark-haired figure, eyes glistening from the tears that had just been shed. He hadn’t touched him for a week now, seen not hide nor hair, but he could still feel the soft bristling of skin against skin, the wetness of Blake Lewis’s tears on his bare chest.

He held down the “4” key and waited for the response. Blake was already on speed dial. 

It was a few long, agonizing seconds before the dull, intermittent buzzing of the phone stopped, and Chris’s heart jumped in his chest with anticipation at hearing Blake’s voice. But then it immediately fell back to its normal position at the sound of a different, higher tone on the other end of the line.

“Blake Lewis’s phone, beatboxing god and blatant Monopoly cheater!” Came the unmistakably chipper voice of Jordin through the phone.

Chris smiled, genuinely pleased to hear his good friend’s voice after so many days of being apart from the rest of their close-knit crew. Even so, it disappointed him; as much as he loved Jordin, she wasn’t Blake. “So you’ve given up your dreams at superstardom to become a receptionist?” he joked.

Jordin laughed. “He’s in makeup,” she explained. “I was just going to let it ring, but then I saw your name on the Caller ID, and I just _knew_ he’d die if he missed this call.” There was a strange inflection in her voice, as if the teenager knew far more than she was letting on. Could it be that Blake told her? No, Chris instantly shot down that thought in his head. He thought back to Phil, who was standing near the park entrance signing autographs, and those knowing looks. Perhaps he and Blake weren’t as discreet as they thought.

He heard a shuffling on the other end – Jordin was probably handing over the phone to Blake. His mouth went dry, and an anxious flutter rose in his gut; he didn’t realize how much he was dying to hear Blake’s voice until now.

“Tell me you got a shot in front of CBGB.”

A broad grin spread across Chris’s face; it was so good to hear Blake’s lighthearted banter, the hint of laughter ever present in his voice. “CBGB’s closed months ago, man,” he responded, leaning back against the bench and finally beginning to relax.

Blake feigned astonishment; Chris could picture his face in an exaggerated gasp. He never thought he’d miss the older man this much over such a short period of time, but here he was, just five days from leaving California and already desiring to see his face again. “Like that matters! It’s still sacred ground. Didn’t I teach you anything?”

Chris couldn’t help but laugh aloud at Blake’s demeanor; it was so sudden that a small flock of pigeons scattered away at the sound. “Speaking of ‘sacred ground,’” he said, “You’ll never guess what I’m staring at right now.”

He could almost feel the excitement build up in Blake, reach out and touch it as if there were no distance between the two. “No shit, are you at the Dakota right now? Strawberry Fields? And don’t lie to me, dude, because seriously –“

“Blake!” he interrupted, quickly sensing the man on the other line was about the drift off into a ramble. And as much as he would love to hear Blake prattle on about nothing in his excited, enlivened tone, he could see the impatience settling in the assistants’ faces. “Me and Phil, we’re over at the Imagine mosaic right now. And it’s so beautiful here…peaceful. It’s hard to believe we’re in the middle of this huge city, only a block away.”

Blake’s voice softened. “That…that sounds great, Chris.” There was a slight pause on Blake’s end, as if he were deciding whether or not to add anything. Finally, in a lower tone, he admitted, “I wish I could be there to see it with you.”

A lump formed in Chris’s throat at Blake’s words and his heart swelled with emotion. “I wish you were here, too,” he said, surprised at the sound of his own voice, strained and choked-up.

Suddenly, like a little light bulb switching on in Chris’s brain, he jumped to his feet. “Waitaminit!” he said, striding over to Phil, who was snapping photos of his daughters. “I’ve got an idea.” Tapping Phil on the shoulder to catch his attention, he silently motioned to the camera in Phil’s hand, then to the cell phone at Chris’s ear, and finally down at the mosaic. Surprisingly enough, Phil caught on quickly, nodded his head in agreement. Chris knelt down before the artwork, as Blake’s voice grew ever louder on the phone at his ear.

“Chris? Chris?! What’s going on? Are you still there? You didn’t get mugged, did you?!” His slightly panicked ramblings only made Chris smile brighter more genuine, as Phil clicked the shutter.

“Congratulations,” Chris said into the phone, as Blake was just about to blame every pickpocket in New York of hijacking his friend. “You just took a picture with me in front of the John Lennon Memorial in Central Park.”

“I…wait, what?” Blake stuttered, the news startling him. He thought in silence for a moment, then burst out laughing, a deep true belly laugh that sometimes Chris felt like Blake reserved only for him. “Oh, you fucking dork, you!” he said between gasping bursts of laughter.

Chris opened his mouth to speak, a witty retort hot on his lips, when one of the suits caught his attention with a frown and pointed at his watch. His smile faded; back to the grind. “I gotta go,” he said sullenly. “We’re doing TRL now, I think.”

Blake scowled over the phone. “Ew, TRL. Good luck with the 15 year olds.”

“Yeah.”

There was a silence between the two men; not an awkward pause, but a pause nonetheless, a quick gathering of thoughts and emotions on both their parts. Finally, Chris decided to take the leap. He cleared his throat, feeling a blush rush to his cheeks. “Blake?” he said, his voice sounded much different from before. “I love you.”

A painful silence emanated from the receiver; Chris’s thoughts immediately turned to panic and worry. It wasn’t like the words hadn’t been said before, many times. And Blake had been the one quicker to say it, more frequently, meaningfully: sweltering hot breaths when they had sex, mumbled dreamily right before sleep and little whispers all throughout the day that made the competition more bearable. But maybe something was wrong this time, maybe something had happened that…

The sound of faint coughing echoed in his ear, and the timbre was far too high for Blake. It then dawned on Chris just why Blake might have been so silent and he cringed.

“Blake, I’m on speakerphone, aren’t I?”

Much to his embarrassment, a small chorus of voices answered back: production assistants, makeup artists, even Jordin’s familiar tone responded cheerfully. “Hi, Chris!” Chris groaned, absolutely mortified that he just professed his love for his alleged best friend – though, with the knowing looks and remarks from Phil and Jordin today, he wondered if he and Blake had kept it well hidden to others as well – in front of a large portion of the Idol production crew. The only person who he hadn’t heard speak in the past few moments, was Blake.

The line grew quiet again; Chris had the fleeting thought to end the call and pre-empt any further misery or ridicule. But just as he cast his eyes down in doubt, looking upon the simple yet profound message of a man that touched his life, touched Blake’s, yet died before either of them were ever born, he heard the clear, distinctive voice of Blake Lewis over the telephone, the phone still set to speaker. A declaration of truth to everyone that would hear.

“I love you too, Chris.”


End file.
